Driving through Alabama this past weekend, my research assistant Robbie Sagers and I stopped at the campus of Samford University, a Baptist-like school in Birmingham. I wanted to show Robbie the beautiful, elegant, and historic campus. On the way out, I stopped by the student center on the undergraduate side of the campus and picked up a copy of the student newspaper, the Samford Crimson.
The paper included an article by a Samford biology professor seeking to debunk the claims of Intelligent Design (ID). The professor was irritated that an ID proponent is scheduled to speak on the campus, so he offered a brief “evolutionary science 101” to counter the claims of the ID theorist before he arrives. After arguing for Darwinian naturalism, the professor ends with his assessment of the relationship between evolutionary science and religion:
Science deals only with physical information and can never assume the metaphysical. This must be left to the philosophers. Likewise, one can never prove a god-like designer with physical information. So where then does religion lie? Religion lies in one’s faith experienced through reflection of self, community, and a personal God.
In the column next to the Darwinist defense was an op/ed called “Serving Time” by a political science student objecting to the mandatory chapel services at the university. As he put it, “I thank God every Tuesday and Thursday for the iPod and French homework.”
The student’s comments are immature and catty, to be sure. He writes that as he tries to fulfill all his mandatory chapel hours, “I spend more time contemplating what I find more repulsive: charismatic speakers with bad hair or generously mediocre dancing.” He writes about a mission trip testimony featuring pictures of a Samford co-ed in pearls, diamonds, and a Louis Vuitton purse smiling among the dirty faces of children across the seas, each picture “simply a cosmopolitan tribute to the shrine of her trip.”
Now every institution will have bitter, shallow students who chafe against virtually any aspect of community life, including chapel. And I am certain that the university’s chapel services can’t be as bad as he describes. Still, one wonders if perhaps there is a connection between a biology faculty assuring students that a personal God is a matter of “one’s faith experience,” not the real world of quarks and supernovas.
If biologists, who study “life” after all, cannot contribute to a Christian vision of following the One who brings “life and that more abundantly” (John 10:10), then what is left to fill the void? If “integrating faith and learning” simply means encouraging one’s internal, private “faith” divorced from the flesh-and-blood realities of life, then one wonders why the students do not turn Jesus’s question to Nicodemus around to their professors: “If we cannot believe God in earthly things, then how can we believe him in heavenly things?”
Unfortunately, Protestant colleges around the country have twitched in this web for over a century. Lusting after academic respectability, they hire faculty members who follow the repective party lines of their guilds. Often, this includes the religion faculty chasing after the dusty theories of German liberals or the faddish proposals of postmodern philosophers (thankfully, at Samford, with the exception of an orthodox divinity school faculty). But they still must be a “Christian” school, so what makes it so? Well, the same thing that makes an individual so: privatized faith, thoroughly severed from the rest of thought and life. In short, one makes up for Darwinism in biology with chapel attendance and mission trips. But without a coherent worldview vision, this ends up as so much pseudo-Gnostic spirituality reflecting on “self, community, and a personal God” with, as this student cynic puts it, “no reason for respect.”
One can hope for some vital chapel preachers at Samford, preachers that point students to a sovereign Creator who seeks to take every thought captive to the lordship of Christ, preachers who show the all-encompassing story of the Bible, who proclaim that every rival system and theory will be brought before a Judgment Seat.
But one must also hope these preachers speak loudly. At least one student is on the back row, listening to an iPod.
